LETTER: SA should move away from mining to tourism and farming
A word not often heard in economic discussions is sustainability, often defined as the capacity of the economy for continuance into the long-term future. We should recognise that our economy is utterly dependent on the country and planet to provide all our raw material for production, and it must be also able to absorb and deal with all our waste. A sustainable economy developed in the 19th century considered a simple model including only equilibrium and efficiency. This model was seriously deficient in that it did not reflect reality by not including pollution and assuming certain gifts of nature are free. Later it was proposed that the economy is in fact a living complex system and more appropriate for study in that it reflects flows of energy, matter and information through web-like networks of individual components. Studies showed that there is a strong relationship between diversity and the interconnectivity of the different agents. Highly efficient systems unfortunately lead t...
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